Michael Royzen, a 17-year-old high school student living in Seattle, has been coding since he was 12 and loves it so much, he's certain that he's going to do it for a living one day.

He's off to a good start. He was part of a team of kids that won the 2015 TechGLOBAL Civic Hackathon for an app called VoicePedia, which reads Wikipedia entries aloud for the visually impaired. It's available on Apple's App Store.

The second app of his to be accepted into the App Store was a derivative called RecipeReadr, which reads your recipes aloud. It cost $1.99 and has had a couple thousand downloads, so far, Royzen tells us.

That was enough of a commercial success to land him a scholarship to Apple's 2016 Worldwide Developer's Conference teen program, where he briefly met Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple's famed senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi in what he describes as a "life changing" event.

A few years ago, Apple didn't allow teen programmers into its conferences at all. As we previously reported, one of the most famous Apple teen coders was John Meyer who invented the flashlight app Just Light for the iPhone 4 (before Apple integrated a flashlight feature into iOS). He followed that up with a hugely successful app called Perfect Shot.

When Mayer was 16, he had to sneak into WWDC, getting his father to get a pass for him. (Meyer is now in his early 20's and running his own citizen journalism startup, Fresco News.)

Today, however, Apple welcomes young programmers with open arms via its WWDC scholarship program. Apple gives about 400 kids a free pass to the conference (and will even help pay for travel for a handful of them). They attend special programming where they can meet other kid programmers and get feedback on their work from Apple employees.

Apple just opened up applications for its 2017 scholarship program.

Source: Yahoo